Reference may be made to the following U.S. patents of interest U.S. Pat. Nos.: 3,544,769; 3,628,452; 3,693,156; 3,837,570; and 3,859,509.
In typical credit card sales transactions, the customer's credit card is placed on a manual embossing unit containing the appropriate merchant's identification. A standard group of sales slips containing respective copies for the merchant, the customer and an associated credit card issuer is placed in the embossing unit above the credit card. The sales clerk enters any other information desired, such as the sale amount, date of sale, etc., and upon movement of a manual embosser each front face of the respective copies is imprinted so as to contain all of the information necessary for preparing monthly customer billings.
Generally, in the preparation of such monthly billings, an operator at the credit card issuer's processing facility reads the information for each sales transaction from the credit card issuer's copy and inserts this information into automatic data processing equipment. The automatic data processor then collates the information and prints the customer billing statement which typically may include several sales transactions. The increasing use of credit card sales transactions has led to a substantial delay in preparing and forwarding the customer billing, thus leading to accompanying delays in payments to the credit card issuers. It is therefore extremely desirable to reduce as much as possible the time presently required for preparing a respective customer billing statement.
Currently, attempts at reducing this turnover time, i.e., the period of time existing between the sale transaction and the customer's payment, have concentrated on using optical character recognition (OCR) equipment which ideally can read characters and automatically process the sales slips. However, in virtually all currently existing embossing/printing apparatus for preparing credit card sales slips, the front face of the credit card issuer's containing the transaction information consists of a second or third level carbon impression. This results in about 15-50% of the sales slips being rejected by the existing OCR equipment because of incomplete or illegible numbers. Ideally, the OCR equipment should only require about 5% rejects. However, the now standardized, relatively inexpensive embossing/printing mechanism used at the point of sale with existing credit card sales slips simply cannot provide any better than the present 15-50% reject percentage using OCR equipment at the credit card issuer's processing center.
This seemingly undesirable reject ratio is somewhat tolerated because of the significant difference in the number of transactions that can be handled by OCR automatic equipment as compared to manual entry. As an example, OCR and MICR (magnetic ink character recognition) automatic processing equipment is capable of handling about 10,000 to 70,000 documents per hour respectively, whereas only about 300 documents can be handled by using manual entry of the transaction information. Thus, even with 15-50% rejects it becomes desirable to utilize as much as possible the OCR or MICR equipment and thereafter utilize manual entry for those documents which have been rejected.
Thus, it is extremely desirable to reduce the number of the rejects so that as many credit card issuer's copies of the sales slip as possible can be handled by existing OCR or other types of automatic data processing equipment.